


One Last Time

by Miss_Peletier



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: 3x09, Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 11:17:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7359094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_Peletier/pseuds/Miss_Peletier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marcus Kane never thought he’d get to see Abby Griffin before his execution. </p>
<p>Very slightly canon-divergent retelling of the “I can’t do this again” scene in 3x09 from Marcus’ perspective.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Last Time

          The hallway was the ocean, the ties on his wrists and feet were anchors, and Marcus Kane was drowning. 

          Being pulled from the cell alone, instead of in tandem with Lincoln and Sinclair, had that effect. Despite all his iron strength, his insistence on remaining strong, Marcus felt his heartbeat speeding up and his stomach crawling its way toward his throat. 

         As he walked down the metallic corridors of his home, his every step choked by the restraints around his ankles, he couldn’t help but wonder if this was the last time he’d see it all. The last time his feet would step on the tile in this corridor. The last time he’d squint from the glare of these lights, the last time he’d breathe this air. His moments on Earth were trickling away, and he knew what was left of his life was a laundry list of lasts. 

         But the truth of the matter was that if it led his people to understanding what Pike had become, the road he was leading them down, he’d kneel on that solid ground in front of the gun’s barrel. It wasn’t the rebellion he had imagined or an ending he desired, but it was the undeniable hand fate had dealt him. 

         And in the end, if God truly was a forgiving man, Marcus couldn’t help but hope that he’d see his mother again. 

        When the door to the conference room opened with a faint hiss, Marcus Kane didn’t know what to expect. A gun pointed straight at him? A firing squad? Just Pike? He had prepared himself for the worst, for the most horrible, deplorable scenarios, and it never occurred to him that what lay waiting behind those metallic barriers might not have been grotesque at all.

       It never occurred to him that he was being taken straight to Abby Griffin.

       “You can thank Chancellor Pike for this,” the guard barked, shoving him into the room. “You have five minutes.”

       The door hissed shut again, but Marcus was far past the point of being able to hear it. She was there in front of him, so vivid and damningly, hauntingly beautiful, and for a moment he had to convince himself that this wasn’t a dream. In what reality, he wondered, would a man like himself be allowed to see her one last time? 

        But her presence presented a new problem, one for which he had no solution. How could he go about telling her everything he wanted to say, everything he needed her to hear, without shattering into a thousand pieces? There were too many things he had to apologize for, things she had to know before he said his final goodbye, but his tongue had turned to lead in his mouth. 

       Abby blinked, shutting her eyes a little too quickly and for a little too long, and he realized that she’d been crying.

       “Are you all right?” he asked as he approached her, his head running a film reel of all the awful things Pike could have done to her in the time he’d been in lockup.  _If he’s hurt her, so help me, I’ll find a way to make him pay. Even if I only have hours left._

        She nodded, and he felt the knot of worry in his chest come untied. The faint smile that flickered across her trembling mouth chipped away at the edges of his heart. _There’s nothing I can say that won’t hurt her,_  he thought despairingly.

       “I won’t let this happen to you,” she said firmly, taking a step toward him. She was close enough now that he could hear her uneven breathing, he could see her shoulders shaking. Another chunk of his heart, gone.

       He had to make himself say something, had to force some words out of his heavy lips even though it felt like every syllable was being forced out of him. 

       “Abby, listen to me,” he said, his voice wavering. “Anyone caught helping us will be condemned to death, too.”

       Her brown eyes found their way to his, and he prayed with every ounce of strength he had left that she wouldn’t get involved. His own death, he could handle. He could even justify it. He could make sense of it. After all, after everything he’d done, the suffering and pain he’d caused, perhaps this was nothing more than the powers of the universe giving him what he deserved.

       But her? If he had his way, Abby Griffin would die peacefully years and years from now, surrounded by her family and every single person on Earth that she loved. She wouldn’t die at an execution, not from a treason sentence. Not because she tried to help him, the man who sentenced the man she loved to death. The man who shocklashed her. 

       “Then I won’t get caught,” she responded, her lower lip trembling slightly. Despite the pain that burned him with every breath he took, Marcus had to laugh. Even here, under these Earthen skies, after everything they’d been through and all the challenges they’d faced, she was still  _Councilor_  Abigail Griffin. She was still that wonderfully infuriating woman who didn’t take no for an answer, the only one who had the ability to drive him mad with both longing and anger. And, he finally let himself admit, love. 

        If he tried to pinpoint a single moment when he realized he was in love with her, it would have been like trying to find a single star on Earth and then attempting to find it again in space. There were too many brilliant moments, times when he looked at her in awe and wonder and felt something electrifying stirring inside of him. She was his light when everything inside of him was dark. That brightness had slowly multiplied and expanded to fill an entire galaxy within his soul, and she was the sun it orbited around.

       Even if she didn’t feel the same, he wouldn’t let that light be extinguished.

       “Please, Abby,” he whispered, his words escaping as little more than despairing gasps. The mental image of her inside that cold, hopeless cell…it was too much for him to bear. “I’m begging you, just don’t…don’t. Our people need someone here to show them the way out of the dark.”

        She was quiet, deathly quiet, her eyes shining with tears. 

       “I can’t do this again,” she said. Her voice broke, and an ax came down inside his chest to split the last piece of his heart in half. 

         _Again_. 

         All those days and nights he’d spent telling himself he’d never be good enough for her. All those times he thought he saw something hiding in her gaze when she looked at him that evaporated when he glanced back. Was it sadistic, he wondered, to be almost  _happy_  in this moment? To feel some twisted, tainted joy in knowing that the woman he loved felt the same for him? That happiness evaporated as he considered the first time this happened had been his fault, and this would be his fault too. 

          Her hands hovered in the air next to the sides of his face, as if she were both drawn to him and afraid to touch him. They finally settled there, her thumbs lightly stroking his cheeks, and something in the contact of skin on skin fractured his reverie enough to drive home their reality. She loved him, he loved her, and they only had minutes left before everything fell apart.

        And in that moment, as she leaned in to press her forehead against his with a muffled sob and buried her fingers in his hair, Marcus realized the cruelest punishment was not the bullet that lay in wait for him somewhere within Arkadia’s walls. It was the ties around his hands and feet, the damned restraints that kept his arms from wrapping around her trembling frame and kept his hands from wiping away every tear that slipped down her angelic face. 

       Every single point of contact felt like it was setting his body on fire. Her hands left a trail of heat as they travelled from his head to the sides of his neck and his shoulders. Her lips were so close to his, and she leaned forward to narrow the gap even further.

        Even when he’d imagined this moment, dreamt about it, his subconscious mind had never strayed to anything quite so convoluted and miserable as this. He’d have given her the world, the sun, the stars, but now with an expiration date on his life there was a limit to what he could give. If these were to be the last moments they ever shared, the last time he was able to truly show Abigail Griffin how much he loved her, he would give this to her for the heartbreaking present it was. No matter how it ripped him apart inside.

        And so he angled his chin downward, closing his eyes against the darkness of the world around them, and their lips met.

        It was not a graceful kiss. It was not the kind of kiss that lingered and grew up slowly: it was a kiss that lived fast and died young, that knew it had precious little time to be experienced. It was clumsy and desperate, anxious and yearning, afraid and emboldened. It somehow said everything that Marcus had needed to say without expressing a single word, and that axe split his heart into thirds as the rest of the world faded away.

       His mind was only capable of producing the same sentence, over and over and over again with every throb of his pulse:  _I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you._

       Abby’s hands brushed up his neck and tangled in his hair again. She pressed herself against him tentatively, little by little, deepening their connection so that he could taste the salt that had traveled from her eyes to her impossibly soft lips. Her hands were shaking in his hair. His hands were shaking in their restraints. They were both gasping for air, but he’d never know whether it was from lack of oxygen or lack of time.

       They were as close to being one as they had ever been. He felt closer to falling apart than he had ever felt. So, hating himself all the while, he brought his hands up to rest on her arms and gently pulled her hands from the sides of his head to rest on his shoulders again. 

       She broke away from him slowly. He tried to record what those final moments felt like so he could replay them when he stared down the barrel of the gun that would separate him from her forever.

       “Abby,” he whispered. “ _Abby_.”

       She leaned in again. He knew what was coming next, what had to come next. His heart was now in fourths and his eyes were burning. 

      “Please don’t make this harder than it already is,” he said, leaning away from her just enough to make it clear that he couldn’t kiss her again. Fractions of his steely courage had melted away and been replaced with an even deeper despair, and he couldn’t let that strength dissolve. 

       If he kept kissing her, there was no way he’d be able to let go of her again. And he had to let go.  _They_  had to let go.

      He heard her gasp, a saddened, hitched inhale that he knew he’d take with him to his grave. His brain still was only forming those same three words, even though he couldn’t shove them past the lump in his throat.

      He called for the guard. His heart was in fifths. 

      As the men approached to take him back to his cell and away from Abby for the rest of eternity, he gave her a small nod. It was a slight gesture, watered down and flimsy against what had happened just seconds before, but he hoped it told her to stay strong. To hold a torch against the darkness Pike had heaped upon them all. To guide them all into the light.

      And in the end, if God truly was a forgiving man, perhaps he’d see her again someday. Years from now, when all this suffering and loss was a distant memory, perhaps he’d be reunited with her inside the stars. 

     But even as the cell doors slammed shut behind him, he was only able to think of those three words. She’d never hear him say them, but she knew. 

    _I love you. I love you. I love you._


End file.
